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More construction firms in Texas and across the country plan to hire more people, bid on more projects and raise their prices, however they remain cautiously optimistic given lingering challenges, according to data released today by the Associated General Contractors of America.

“Overall, the construction industry should be larger, healthier and more profitable by end of 2013,” AGCA chief executive Stephen Sandherr said today during a teleconference. Construction companies are most optimistic about the private sector market, especially hospital and higher education construction.

After losing one of every five jobs during the Great Recession, the construction industry stabilized in 2012, Sandherr said. The industry added 18,000 and investments rose by about 7 percent, he said.

While the outlook appears promising, contractors are still grappling with challenges, including less demand for public projects, rising materials prices and higher health care costs.

Twenty percent of more than 1,300 construction firms recently surveyed by the trade group expect the overall construction industry to grow this year and more than half don’t expect growth until at least 2015.

Officials of two construction companies in Texas and California said in the teleconference that they’ve seen significant increase in demand for work and even a shortage of labor, but added that experience differs greatly in various parts of each state.

“We have seen a dramatic increase in the demand for labor and construction and materials from the Eagle Ford shale oil-and-gas play in recent years,” said Dean Word, a partner in Dean Word Construction in New Braunfels. “Texas continues to grow on a population basis … and the recession didn’t hit Texas as badly as many other places in the country.”

“It’s just nuts in the [San Francisco] Bay Area right now,” said John Nunan, president of Unger Construction in Sacramento, Calif. “f you drove there, you’d think there was no economic problem in this country, but up toward Sacramento and beyond, it’s like a dust bowl.”

Nunan said he sees a shortage of skilled trade workers, such as electricians, sheet metal workers, plumbers and masons. Word said pipeline welders and excavators are in short supply in Central Texas.